Note to readers: This blog is dedicated to exploring new training tools and techniques to help us become better therapists. May we all become “supershrinks!"

Learning a psychotherapy technique can be like a romantic tragedy. You go to the workshop, fall in love with the technique (and occasionally the presenter), and go home with fantasies of all your therapy cases getting unstuck. On Monday morning in your office, however, everything falls apart: you can’t remember the techniques (despite the post-its), you can’t do them correctly, or, even worse, you do the interventions perfectly but the client responds totally differently than how the clients in the presenters’ videos responded. Sometimes I want to yell, “No, you are supposed to cry when I say that line, and get angry when I say this line!”

Most training and supervision lacks the most important variable in therapy: the client. The best training occurs in an actual therapy session. I want to know what techniques to use with my client, not the client in the case reports or videos. But what if the expert I want to learn from lives across the country, or I don’t have a one-way mirror room? Now, thanks to internet, I can bring him into my office.

I would like to share a new method of supervision that has been made possible by recent technological advances. “Remote live supervision” allows a supervisor to observe a therapy session over the internet and give feedback to the therapist in real time. The technology is inexpensive and easy to setup. This new method has promise to greatly increase the accessibility of top-quality supervision and training across the field of psychotherapy, as therapists will no longer be limited by geographic distance.

Specific instructions on how to set up the remote live supervision for both PCs and Macintosh computers, along with a discussion of technical issues, can be found here.

Combining the video of the therapy session with the transcript of the supervisor’s moment-to-moment comments makes for a powerful training tool, as trainees get to see the actual results of following (or not following) the supervisor’s interventions. Another option for training is group video, where a team of trainees can observe a remote live supervision in real time.

I do remote live supervision with Jon Frederickson, MSW, to accelerate my learning of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), an affect-focused therapy effective for healing trauma, anxiety, anger, relationship problems and somatic symptoms. One aspect of ISTDP that can be challenging for trainees to learn is how to identify and address the automatic, unconscious behaviors clients use to maintain an emotional distance between themselves and others (including the therapist), such as rationalizations, talking in hypothetical terms or being vague. In a review of my work, I found that I was missing my clients’ distancing behaviors, and many sessions could go by without a significant emotional experience or change for the client.

Of course, the client is not the only person in the therapeutic dyad who can unconsciously create emotional distance. Colleagues in a consultation group helped me identify my own pattern of unconscious emotional distancing, especially when working with male clients who were emotional distant or angry. However, I was unable to translate this insight into change in the therapy room.

Through remote live supervision I have been able to get immediate, moment-to-moment identification of distancing behaviors, by both the client and myself, in real therapy sessions. Live supervision can be very challenging, especially when it addresses my own avoidance. It is, however, extremely effective: Jon’s real-time feedback has resulted in multiple breakthroughs of sustained, heavy grief and character change in clients for whom therapy had previously been stuck.

If you have a new psychotherapy training technique you would like to share on this blog, please email me.